The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has become in recent years the go-to authority for major media outlets seeking to document hate crimes. But its reputation as a neutral source of expertise and authority is unwarranted. In an October 2017 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, I pointed out that the lead anecdote in the SPLC’s report on the aftermath of the 2016 election was a hoax. There had been a fire at the historically black Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Mississippi; it was indeed arson, but it wasn’t a racist hate crime. A member of the church was subsequently arrested for the fire and for the spray-painted “Vote Trump” vandalism that accompanied it.
Revisiting that SPLC report, “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election,” shows that the arson anecdote was not an outlier. The SPLC did subsequently footnote and correct the report of the church arson. But at least three other alleged “hate crimes” in the report turn out not to be what they seemed either.
First, at New York’s Canisius College, according to the SPLC, “a black doll was found hanging from a noose in an elevator.” In a November 10, 2016, story (19 days before the SPLC issued its report), Buffalo’s WGRZ reported that the “students who found the doll put it in the elevator as a prank to scare people” and that upon “closer examination . . . two strings attached to the body of the doll’s neck, as part of its construction, do not actually appear to be used as a noose.”
Not only did the noose story fall apart, someone then hung the doll from a curtain rod, took a photo, and created an anti-Trump meme, writing, “Trump Fans Hanging Babies Since 2016.” The students involved in creating and sharing the meme were punished. All of this information was known more than two weeks before the SPLC’s publication of its report.
The second incident may be somewhat less disturbing, but the fact that the real story was also known two weeks before “Ten Days After” was published is revealing, given how simple it would have been for the SPLC to verify the facts.
This story involved a banner on a house in California. The SPLC said:
But RollingOut reported on November 15, 2016, that the homeowner, a black man, readily owned up to having hung the banner:
The third incident, this one at an Indiana church, ostensibly involved hateful Nazi, anti-gay, and pro-Trump vandalism. The SPLC asserted:
In May 2017, however, the Indianapolis Star reported that far from its being the work of a Trumpist agitator, a gay man had been arrested and admitted being the vandal. After being charged with criminal mischief, George Stang told the Star that the election left him “fearful, scared and alone” and he “wanted other people to be scared with me.” While the arrest came well after the SPLC report was issued, the incident remains uncorrected on the SPLC’s website and in the report.
The reflexive citation of the SPLC by the media, as if that provides some evidentiary heft to their own reports, is unwarranted. The SPLC states that its stories are collected from two sources: “submissions to the #ReportHate page on the SPLC website and media accounts.” The SPLC goes on to say that it “excluded incidents that authorities have determined to be hoaxes; however, it was not possible to confirm the veracity of all reports.”
Many of the incidents in the “Ten Days After” report were self-reported to the SPLC with no documentation. For some of the remaining anecdotes I was able to find news stories verifying that events took place as portrayed by the SPLC, although my review was not comprehensive, and not all of the stories were equal in rigor or sourcing.
Given the frequency with which the SPLC is cited in media reports as an authoritative investigator of “hate crimes,” the organization’s lack of rigor should be disconcerting to reporters relying on the data. The SPLC’s endowment grew to more than $432 million last year, thanks to staggeringly successful fundraising—aided in no small part by the perception that it is a bulwark against the hate crimes its own reports exaggerate. If the SPLC wanted to engage in more thorough research before issuing alarming reports, cost should certainly be no impediment.
